Many features of IDA and other disassemblers are taken for granted nowadays but it’s not always been the case. As one example, let’s consider automatic variable naming. A little bit of history In the first versions, IDA did not differ much from a dumb disassembler with comments and renaming and showed pretty much raw instructions with […]
Read MoreEven though Python 2 has been end-of-life’d on January 1st, 2020, we have until now been providing IDAPython builds that can run on a Python 2 runtime. But usage of Python 2 runtimes has been discouraged for a while now by the Python community, and official downloads for Python 2 for certain systems simply on which IDA runs, don’t exist […]
Read MoreThe first 2022 IDA training session will take place online from 16-20 and 23-25 May 2022 , from 9am Pacific Standard Time. The session is devised to help professional reverse engineers master IDA Pro, the de-facto industry standard reverse engineering tool and take their reversing skills to the next level. Provided by the experts behind […]
Read MoreOutput window is part of IDA’s default desktop layout and shows various messages from IDA and possibly third-party components (plugins, processor modules, scripts…). It also contains the Command-line interface (CLI) input box. Opening the Output window Although it is present by default, it is possible to close this window, or use a desktop layout without it. […]
Read MoreHex-Rays announces the release of IDA Service Pack 1 (SP1) for IDA 7.7. This Service Pack is primarily a bugfix release for a few errors that might affect some users. How to request the new versions As usual, the new versions are free for users with an active support plan. Please use the “Help > Check for free […]
Read MoreWe’ve covered basics of working with string constants (aka string literals) before but IDA support additional features which may be useful in some situations. Exotic string types Pascal and derived languages (such as Delphi) sometimes employ string literals which start with the length followed by the characters. Similarly to the wide (Unicode) strings, they can be […]
Read MoreAs part of our effort to improve the analysis of Go programs, we included FLIRT signatures from functions for the Go runtime and standard library in the recently-released IDA 7.7. Those signatures, that support Go runtimes versions 1.10 through 1.16 (for x64 architectures, on Windows, Linux & Mac), can greatly improve the workflow of users as they […]
Read MoreAlthough the Hex-Rays decompiler was originally written to deal with compiler-generated code, it can still do a decent job with manually written assembly. However, such code may use non-standard instructions or use them in non-standard ways, in which case the decompiler may fail to produce equivalent C code and has to fall back to _asm […]
Read MoreThe last week’s post got preempted by the IDA 7.7 release so I’ll take this opportunity to highlight (ha ha) one of the new features. In previous IDA versions we already had highlight with an option to lock it so it remains fixed while browsing the database. In IDA 7.7 it’s been improved so […]
Read MoreBefore IDA 7.7 IDA versions up to and including 7.6 have been shipping with versions of the Qt toolkit, that didn’t support macOS‘s “dark mode”. Due to popular demand, we came up with a solution in the form of a specific IDA theme, called IDA’s “dark theme”: IDA’s dark theme has been very well received, and a lot of users […]
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